Embodiment

A History

Edited by Justin E.H. Smith

Description

Embodiment--defined as having, being in, or being associated with a body--is a feature of the existence of many entities, perhaps even of all entities. Why entities should find themselves in this condition is the central concern of the present volume. The problem includes, but also goes beyond, the philosophical problem of body: that is, what the essence of a body is, and how, if at all, it differs from matter. On some understandings there may exist bodies, such as stones or asteroids, that are not the bodies of any particular subjects. To speak of embodiment by contrast is always to speak of a subject that variously inhabits, or captains, or is coextensive with, or even is imprisoned within, a body. The subject may in the end be identical to, or an emergent product of, the body. That is, a materialist account of embodied subjects may be the correct one.

But insofar as there is a philosophical problem of embodiment, the identity of the embodied subject with the body stands in need of an argument and cannot simply be assumed. The reasons, nature, and consequences of the embodiment of subjects as conceived in the long history of philosophy in Europe as well as in the broader Mediterranean region and in South and East Asia, with forays into religion, art, medicine, and other domains of culture, form the focus of these essays. More precisely, the contributors to this volume shine light on a number of questions that have driven reflection on embodiment throughout the history of philosophy. What is the historical and conceptual relationship between the idea of embodiment and the idea of subjecthood? Am I who I am principally in virtue of the fact that I have the body I have? Relatedly, what is the relationship of embodiment to being and to individuality? Is embodiment a necessary condition of being? Of being an individual? What are the theological dimensions of embodiment? To what extent has the concept of embodiment been deployed in the history of philosophy to contrast the created world with the state of existence enjoyed by God? What are the normative dimensions of theories of embodiment? To what extent is the problem of embodiment a distinctly western preoccupation? Is it the result of a particular local and contingent history, or does it impose itself as a universal problem, wherever and whenever human beings begin to reflect on the conditions of their existence?

Ultimately, to what extent can natural science help us to resolve philosophical questions about embodiment, many of which are vastly older than the particular scientific research programs we now believe to hold the greatest promise for revealing to us the bodily basis, or the ultimate physical causes, of who we really are?

Embodiment

A History

Edited by Justin E.H. Smith

Table of Contents

1. "The Body of Western Embodiment: Classical Antiquity and the Early History of a Problem" Brooke Holmes2. "Embodied or Ensouled: Aristotle on the Relation of Soul and Body" Helen Lang3. "Asceticism and Aestheticism: The Paradox of Embodiment in Plotinus' Enneads" Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams4. "Augustinian Puzzles about Body, Soul, Flesh, and Death" Sarah Byers5. "Medieval Jewish Philosophers and the Human Body" Yoav Meyrav6. "Scholastic Philosophers on the Role of the Body in Knowledge" Rafael Nájera7. "Hobbes's Embodied God" Geoffrey Gorham8. "Leibniz's View of Individuals: Nested or Embodied Individuals" Ohad Nachtomy9. "Descartes and Spinoza: Two Approaches to Embodiment" Alison Peterman10. "Man-Machines and Embodiment: From Cartesian Physiology to Claude Bernard's 'Living Machine'" Philippe Huneman and Charles T. Wolfe11. "The Embodiment of Virtue: Towards a Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science" Jake H. Davis

Reflections1. "The Devil in the Flesh: On Witchcraft and Possession" Véronique Decaix2. "Phantom Limbs" Stephen Gaukroger3. "Embodied Geometry in Early Modern Theatre" Yelda Nasifoglu4. "Ghosts in the Celestial Machine: Embodiment in the Late Renaissance" Jonathan Regier5. "The Genotype/Phenotype Distinction" Emily Herring

Embodiment

A History

Edited by Justin E.H. Smith

Author Information

Justin E. H. Smith is professor in the department of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7. He is the author of The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (2016), Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (2015), and Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (2011), all from Princeton University Press.

Contributors:

Sarah Catherine Byers is an Associate Professor in the philosophy department at Boston College. She is the author of the monograph Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge University Press: 2013) and of articles in, for example, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, the Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, A Companion to Augustine (Wiley-Blackwell), and Augustine's City of God: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides).

Jake Davis is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University and Research Associate at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from CUNY Graduate Center, with an Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science, as well as a Master's in Philosophy from the University of Hawai'i.

Véronique Decaix is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She specialized in Medieval Philosophy. Her research interests are mainly focused on Intentionality, Mind-Body problem and theory of knowledge in the middle Ages. She also published on Ontology and Metaphysics. She is currently writing a book on "Intentionality as constitutive function of the human mind".

Stephen Gaukroger is Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. His books include Explanatory Structures (1978), Cartesian Logic (1989), Descartes, An Intellectual Biography (1995), Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-ModernPhilosophy (2001), Descartes' System of Natural Philosophy (2002), Le Monde en Images (2015); and three volumes of a tetralogy: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (2006), The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (2010), and The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (2016).

Geoffrey Gorham is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota. He is co-editor of The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (University of Minnesota, 2016), and author of Philosophy of Science: ABeginner's Guide (One World, 2009) as well as numerous articles on the philosophy and science of Descartes, Hobbes, Newton and Locke.

Emily Herring is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her research concerns 20th century evolutionary theories in France and the English-speaking world, in particular, the reception of Henri Bergson's metaphysical take on evolution in biological communities.

Brooke Holmes is Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Classics at Princeton University, where she also directs the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (2010) and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2012), as well as numerous articles on the history of philosophy, the history of medicine, and Greek literature. She has also edited Aelius Aristides: Between Greece, Rome, and the Gods (2008), Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism (2012), and The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von Staden (2015). She is currently at work on The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and the Concept of Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity, a multi-authored book entitled Postclassicism, and two edited projects, Antiquities Beyond Humanism and Liquid Antiquity.

Philippe Huneman is a Researcher (Directeur de recherche) at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS/Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. After having worked and published on the constitution of the concept of organism and Kantian metaphysics (including many papers and the book Métaphysique et biologie (Paris: 2008)), he currently investigates philosophical issues in evolutionary theory and ecology, such as the emergence of individuality, the relations between variation and natural selection in evolutionary theory, the role of the concept of organism, and the varieties of explanations in ecology. He also wrote several papers on the emergence of modern psychiatry, especially in 18th century France. He was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2005) and is affiliated professor to the University of Toronto. His research has been published in Erkenntnis, Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Biology andPhilosophy, etc. As editor he published Functions: Selection and Mechanisms (Synthese Library, Springer, 2012), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality (MIT Press, 2013, with Frédéric Bouchard), and Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences (Springer, 2015 with Heams T., Lecointre G., Silberstein M.), and Challenges to the Modern Synthesis: Development, Inheritance and Adaptation (Oxford UP, 2016, with D. Walsh) He belongs to the editorial board of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science and is the series coeditor of "History, Philosophy and Theory in the Life Sciences" (Springer, with T. Reydon and C. Wolfe).

Until her death in 2016, Helen Lang was Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. She was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy and in the history of science, and the author, notably, of The Order of Nature in Aristotle's Physics: Place and the Elements (Cambridge, 1998), and Aristotle's Physics and its Medieval Varieties (SUNY Press, 1992). She also published, with A. D. Macro, a critical edition and translation of Proclus's De Aeternitate Mundi (University of California Press, 2001).

Yoav Meyrav is a junior faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is interested in the transfer of Greek philosophy to the Medieval Arabic and Hebrew worlds, Hebrew philosophical terminology, and philosophy of religion. He is currently working on a new critical edition of the complete Medieval Hebrew translation and Arabic fragments of Themistius' Paraphrase of Aristotle's Metaphysics 12, lost in Greek. An English translation of Themistius' paraphrase (co-authored with Carlos Fraenkel) is also in preparation.

Ohad Nachtomy is Associate Professor and head of the philosophy department at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He works on early modern philosophy, philosophy and history of biology, Wittgenstein's philosophy, and multicultural theory (especially in the Israeli context). His publications include some forty articles and the following books: Possibility, Agency, and Individuality in Leibniz's Metaphysics, (Springer, 2007); The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, (Oxford University Press, 2014), coedited with Justin E. H. Smith; Machines of Nature and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz, (Springer, 2010), coedited with Justin E. H. Smith; The Multicultural Challenge in Israel (eds.), (Academic Studies Press, 2009), coedited with Avi Sagi; and Examining Multiculturalism in Israel (in Hebrew), (Magnes Press, 2003).

Rafael Nájera is Research Fellow at the Thomas Institute (University of Cologne). Previously he was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy at Brown University, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD from McGill University in 2012. His research focuses on notions of science in the Medieval period, both in the Latin and Arabic traditions.

Yelda Nasifoglu is a doctoral candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University. With a background in architecture and the history of science, she researches the development of the idea of praxis in early modern mathematics and architecture. Her research has been supported by the FRQSC (Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et culture), McGill University, and the Early Modern Conversions project based at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. In Fall 2016, she will be a Researcher with the AHRC-funded project 'Reading Euclid: Euclid's Elements of Geometry in Early Modern Britain' at the University of Oxford.

Alison Peterman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. She is especially interested in natural philosophy, metaphysics and philosophy of mind in the early modern period, and has written articles on the natural philosophy of Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Newton and Margaret Cavendish.

Jonathan Regier is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a chercheur associé with the HPS Laboratory SPHERE (UMR 7219) at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He did his graduate work at Université Paris Diderot. His thesis and recent publications have focused on natural philosophy and the mathematization of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is co-editor, with Koen Vermeir, of Boundaries, Extents and Circulations: Space and Spatiality in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (2016). He is also pursuing research on the social integration and diffusion of new technologies.

Lesley-Anne Dyer Williams received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame and is an Assistant Professor of English at LeTourneau University. She also holds an MPhil in Theology from the University of Cambridge and BA from Baylor University. She specializes in the history of the Platonic tradition in the Middle Ages. Her publications include articles on the works of Anselm of Canterbury, John Wyclif, Peter Abelard, Hilary of Poitiers, and Richard of St. Victor. She is currently finishing the edits on her book, Eternity and the Summum Bonumin the Twelfth Century, for the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies Press in Toronto.

Charles T. Wolfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a focus on materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), and has edited volumes including Monsters and Philosophy (2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010, with O. Gal), Vitalism and the scientific image (2013, with S. Normandin), and Brain Theory (2014). His current project is a monograph on the conceptual foundations of Enlightenment vitalism. He is also the Co-Editor of the Springer series in History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences.